Tag: inspiring words

Design Mom’s 6 Secrets for a Smooth Move. I love the box-labeling system, though I have never been able to execute it. Each of my many moves seems to involve several boxes of “miscellaneous” things I waited too long to pack.

The wooden bead clothes-hanging line has been featured before, but it’s getting another mention for being super popular. I pinned it from Mommo, and I wish I could find the original source. I think this would be a fun and easy DIY for dress-ups, or for keepsakes like ballet slippers.

“The child is both a hope and a promise for mankind.” -Maria Montessori, poster on Teachers Pay Teachers

“The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life.” — Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Trendy or not, I love the KonMari Method. It’s less about organization or getting rid of clutter, and more about exercising your intuition to create your ideal lifestyle.

As part of the KonMari tidying process, Marie Kondo encourages you to gain clarity and motivation by holding an image in your mind of the kind of home you want to live in, which lines up with the lifestyle you want to live. In her follow-up manual, Spark Joy, Marie Kondo elaborated,

“Our goal in tidying should be to create a living environment filled with the things we love. […] If you have even one photograph that makes you feel ‘Yes, this is the kind of space I want to live in,’ it will completely change how you feel about tidying up.”

I pin tons of images for inspiration, but more than a year ago, I created this Pinterest board. It is a vision board of carefully selected lifestyle priorities for my home. I created Polyvore images for the main rooms of my home, like my living room inspiration above. I don’t update it frequently, because my values around living in my home for this phase of life, and the way I love for my home design to feel, have remained mostly consistent.

One of my intentions for the year (and which has always been a goal of mine) is to live in a home with a sauna. This means buying a house! The traditional family sauna image is from a Finnish textile company, Lapuan Kankurit.

On a smaller scale, I’d like to keep sprucing up the playhouse we got this summer. It’s not a treehouse like in my ideal image, but it has the same feeling of the kids spending long afternoons imagining, climbing, and playing outside.

Do you have a material, digital, or mental image of your ideal home that you come back to over and over? Do you feel like your home represents the lifestyle you want to live?

Sending love to the Minnesota Lynx! The Los Angeles Sparks defeated the defending champion Minnesota Lynx 77-76 for the WNBA championship. It seems timely to bring up Maya Moore’s piece on increasing visibility for women’s basketball. And to say: #equalplayequalpay.

If my kids seem tense while they’re trying to fall asleep, I give them this 5-second energy sweep. I swear by it!

These clip lights are great for trick-or-treating, and for playing outside after dusk.

I’ve been coloring in Color at Home: A Young House Love Coloring Book while I watch TV in the evenings. I don’t find coloring to be especially relaxing, but I’m having fun with it! After nearly two hours, I’m almost done with the cover page. I listen to the YHL podcast while I’m cleaning and mowing the lawn, and it’s always delightful.

I have to start Christmas gift plans now, because everything craft-related takes me 10x longer than I think it will. I’m really excited about a couple of these Homemade Gift Ideas in Country Living.

Many people dream up a nursery plan long before (or in my case, still years after) a baby is born. I think it’s an act of love to prepare a space for a baby, and it’s also a luxury for parents to have a beautiful respite in those early baby days. There’s plenty of nursery inspiration online, but I’ve noticed that nearly all styled nurseries have an element or two that is either impractical or a safety risk. I picked some gorgeous nurseries that demonstrate tips for a safe, practical and stylish nursery.

Both internally and externally, we minimize it. We have to. To not shrug it off would put is in confrontation mode more often than most of us feel like dealing with. We learn at a young age how to do this. We didn’t put a name or label to it. We didn’t even consider that other girls were doing the same thing. But we were teaching ourselves, mastering the art of de-escalation.

I got really into Jane the Virgin this summer (season 3 October 17!), and since then I have noticed Gina Rodriguez (who plays Jane) everywhere. Virtually. Not in real life, unfortunately. This week she was promoting her latest movie, Deepwater Horizon, on The Tonight Show, and her rapping was awesome. Her passion is just as endearing in Women’s Health October 2016 interview where she said,

“People will say you are not skinny enough, not tall enough, not thick enough, not curvy enough, not white enough, not brown enough, not this enough. Well, I really hope you don’t feel that way about yourself, because then we’re all screwed. […] Stay in your lane, and do you.”